Team Spirit Manager Reveals the Real Reason Behind Panto’s Replacement on the Dota 2 Roster

Dmitry “Korb3n” Belov stated that Team Spirit decided to replace Nikita ‘Panto’ Balaganin with Alexey “Not me” Kosmyinin in their Dota 2 roster because other attempts to resolve the team’s gameplay issues had failed.

The Team Spirit manager made this statement on Twitch.

“Why did we make such a drastic change right before the Int? It was unplayable to continue. We tried to fix it here and there, but it was just unplayable.”

Dmitry “Korb3n” Belov also explained why the announcement of the new player took place right before the start of the DreamLeague Season 29 tournament. Acording to Team Spirit’s manager, testing a new player and preparing the announcement takes quite a bit of time, which is why the team couldn’t introduce the new player earlier due to their busy tournament schedule.

“How far in advance can you announce it? We just finished PGL Wallachia, we got back, discussed it with the team, and made a decision. We need to test players. We’ve just finished the tests. The tests take quite a while, and you’re on a tight schedule.

You need to take photos of the new player, and ideally—film a video. At the very least, you need to take high-quality photos for the tournament broadcasters and for the announcement. And when? If we had two months, please, we wouldn’t have to wait until the last minute; we could have announced it earlier. But time is limited here, so it turned out that the announcement came before DreamLeague.”

As a reminder, Anton “dyrachyo” Shkredov previously commented on the replacement of Nikita “panto” Balaganin on Team Spirit.